[Sidenote: Vanishing Americanism]
New York is a city in America but is hardly an American city.
Nor is any other of our great cities, except perhaps Philadelphia.
Boston is an Irish city, Chicago is a German-Scandinavian-Polish
city, Saint Louis is a German city, and New York is a
Hebrew-German-Irish-Italian-Bohemian-Hungarian city--a cosmopolitan race
conglomeration. Eighteen languages are spoken in a single block. In
Public School No. 29 no less than twenty-six nationalities are
represented. This indicates the complicated problem.
[Sidenote: A Jewish City]
New York is the chief Jewish capital. Of the 760,000 Jews on Manhattan,
about 450,000 are Russian, and they overcrowd the East Side ghetto. In
that quarter the signs are in Hebrew, the streets are markets, the shops
are European, the men, women, and children speak in Yiddish, and all
faces bear the foreign and Hebrew mark plainly upon them.
[Sidenote: An Italian City]
Go on a little further and you find that you are in Little Italy, quite
distinct from Jewry, but not less foreign. Here the names on the signs
are Italian, and the atmosphere is redolent with the fumes of Italy. The
hurdy-gurdy vies with the push-cart, the streets are full of children
and women, and you are as a stranger in a strange land.
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